


Common Cuddles for a Common Cold

by LadyAmina



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (implied) - Freeform, Caretaking, Comfort, Dramatic babies, Fluff, Genderfluid Sirius Black, M/M, Marauders era, Tumblr Prompt, Unbearable sweetness, mild colds, not OVERTLY trans remus but this is me so Remus is trans, scottish poetry, wolfstar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-15
Updated: 2016-12-15
Packaged: 2018-09-08 17:58:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8855341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyAmina/pseuds/LadyAmina
Summary: Most of the student body has fallen ill with a common cold.  SIrius is just feeling it a lot louder.  But Remus helps.





	

“Oh, really now, Black- Mr. Potter, please escort your friend to your tower,” Madam Pomfrey addressed James, who was closest. “There is nothing more I can do for you, it’s the same thing everyone has, Black, you’re not dying.”

The hospital wing had never been so packed full of people. A Ravenclaw Quidditch match gone awry on top of the miserable, infectious cold making its way through the student body had Madam Pomfrey up to her elbows in students.

“I am, I can feel it. I don’t have what everyone else has, I have some mutation of it, it’s so much stronger,” Sirius whined. He was curled up on the bed farthest from any window, wrapped in not one but three blankets, each with their own heating charm insulating him.

“It is not and I need that bed you’re on, so _out_.”

She dismissed Sirius and his three-person visitor party with a vial of pepperup potion and instructions to lay down and not miss too much class.

Sirius was shocked and horrified.

He’d been cast out.

Left to die.

He kept the blankets.

~

James, Remus, and Peter accompanied Sirius back to Gryffindor tower to tuck him properly into a bed. They aimed for his bed but missed by two. He fell quite deliberately into the untidy mess of Remus’s sheets and pillows.

“Padfoot, weren’t you just saying you couldn’t possibly be anywhere near the draft of a window?” Peter asked, leaping onto his own bed and rolling over onto his stomach to speak. “Yours has no windows, Remus’s has two. Where is your math going?”

“Don’t care, this one has Moony.” Sirius pulled the blanket up over himself while Remus sat on the very edge of the bed and laid an arm over him.

“Your bed could have that too,” Remus offered to the lump of linen that was Sirius.

“Not the same.” Sirius buried his relentlessly drippy nose into Remus’s best pillow. He didn’t mind.

~

The four of them stayed in the dormitory for the hour or so before dinner. Peter and James had occupied themselves playing card games on the floor beside Remus’s bed while Remus watched and occasionally stroked Sirius’s arm soothingly through the blanket.

“Sirius, we’ll bring you back something, yeah?” Peter asked, but only got a pillow-muffled-whimper of a response.

“We’ll see what’s for dinner and if it’s nothing light, we’ll go down to the kitchens and see about some soup or something,” James added.

Remus looked down at his datefriend. His hair was shiny with oil from going without a wash and his forehead was clammy. Everything in him just wanted Sirius to get better. He hated not hearing him laugh for so long.

“You both go on, bring me back something, will you?” he asked, kicking out of his socks.

“Are you sure that’s wise? Moony, you have the body-heat-retention of a bowtruckle,” Peter warned. “You may both die of hypothermia if you get too close.”

Remus scowled and pulled back the covers. “Bring back something for me that’s not soup.”

“We’ll be back,” James assured them.

The dormitory was quiet without them. Remus thought Sirius might be sleeping, but recognized his breathing as not.

“What did they do with the pepperup potion?” Sirius asked after a few peaceful moments.

“James chucked it in a bin in the common room.”

Pepperup potion did terrible things to Sirius. He’d been forced to take it in their second year, despite telling Pomfrey that it only made him feel worse. He’d spent the rest of the week in the hospital wing, cold forgotten, but with a seemingly incurable migraine. Nothing the nurse did helped at all. It wasn’t her fault she’d forgotten the incident and handed him the potion earlier, her head and her heart were with a third of the entire student body at the moment.

“Thank you.” Sirius leaned back into Remus’s embrace. The closeness of their bodies and the charmed blankets around them made for a very cozy, warm, little nest.

“We wouldn’t let it near you.” Remus kissed the shell of Sirius’s ear and made soothing circles over his stomach with his palm.

“Mmm,” Sirius sighed, the first noise denoting something other than pain and misery that had come out of him all day, “My heroes.”

“We do our best.”

“Tell me a poem, Hero?”

“Which one?” Remus asked. He knew a handful of the ones Sirius liked to listen to best by rote.

“Any.”

Remus searched his mind for a moment, then began.

_“The King sits in Dunfermline town,_   
_Drinking the blood-red wine;_   
_“O where shall I get a skeely skipper_   
_To sail this ship or mine?”_

_Then up and spake an eldern knight,_  
 _Sat at the King’s right knee:_  
 _“Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor_  
 _That ever sailed the sea_.” Remus paused to allow Sirius to uneasily turn himself over and rest his cheek on Remus’s chest. The effort caused a coughing fit that ended in a quiet whine. Remus rubbed Sirius’s back until well after he was through infecting Remus’s shirt, and kissed the top of his head.

“Keep going?” Sirius requested.

Remus obliged, eyes closed.   
_“The King has written a broad letter,_  
 _And sealed it with his hand,_  
 _And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens,_  
 _Was walking on the strand._

_“To Noroway, to Noroway,_   
_To Noroway o’er the foam;_   
_The King’s daughter of Noroway,_   
_‘Tis thou must fetch her home.”_

_The first line that Sir Patrick read,_  
 _A loud laugh laughed he;_  
 _The next line that Sir Patrick read-_ ” Remus was interrupted by the soft sound of Sirius snoring. He considered continuing in case the brogue and rhythmic lines might somehow reach Sirius in his dreams, but the warmth of the person tucked into his arms was too welcoming to resist slumping into his pillow and allowing himself to drift along with him.

~

Peter and James brought back a bowl of soup for Sirius and two helpings of the Great Hall’s steak and kidney pie for Remus. They sat on Remus’s bed while the other two ate, and relayed all the drama of the evening in great detail.

Sirius took pauses to cough or sneeze as necessary, but no longer seemed to feel he was at death’s door. Remus liked to think it might have something to do with their fingers, tangled together on top of the blankets.


End file.
